Lean On Me: KPIs that Support Lean Six Sigma Efforts

I just got back from the Logistics and Supply Chain Forum in Miami.  It’s a great event that pairs up companies and vendors that are looking to jointly solve supply chain and logistics problems.  While I’m hesitant to use the term “speed dating”, the format allows attendees to have 1:1 conversations with over 25 supply chain practitioners in two days.  And there’s a lot we can learn from each other.

I had the opportunity to meet with the Vice President of Sourcing & Supply for Sealy Corporation.  As the world’s largest maker of bedding products, chances are you spend 1/3 of your life on one of their beds (although I can’t remember when I actually got 8 hours of sleep in one night…)

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Five Ways to Cut Supply Chain Costs and Improve Efficiency

Earlier this week, I wrote about the ever-present push to reduce costs in the supply chain. Even when chief procurement officers say they’re more interested in product quality or service, cost control remains a top priority.

Cost cutting can be tricky, though. Chief procurement officers and supply chains managers walk a thin line between maintaining quality while reducing expenses. But it is possible to do both, particularly if you focus on being more efficient rather than just cut supply chain costs.

Here are five ways supply chain managers and chief procurement officers are pursing supply chain costs savings:

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Four Reasons to Pursue B2B Visibility

There’s a lot of talk about visibility in the B2B and supply chain trades. But why is visibility so important?

While supply chain managers may know the insides and outs of what’s happening in their supply chain, that doesn’t make the information accessible to business leaders.

In fact, many business leaders are content to let B2B processes be a literal “black box.” That’s a problem for procurement and supply chain leaders, who are under growing budget pressures to cut costs while supporting revenue growth.

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Get Smart: What’s Your Process Intelligence Quotient? (aka – we are what we measure)

I come from the Semiconductor industry.  Talk about a group that needs to measure nearly *everything*… Every time I talk with high tech companies, I’m amazed at their ability to come up with meaningful metrics to explain and track all parts of their business, from Moore’s Law to the trends monitored in Tashiro Charts.  Which makes this corollary to Matt Green’s post from the ARIS Community all the more puzzling.

I was just north of the US-Canadian border visiting a high tech manufacturing customer, and we were discussing techniques to improve their Order-to-Cash process.  The company had recently received some low marks in customer satisfaction and I was keen to zero in on the company’s key metrics for this process to see where they could improve.  We all know “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”, so introducing real-time visibility into these KPIs could really bring value.  But at the end of the day, how did this high tech company measure up in its Process Intelligence Quotient (PIQ)?

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